How an eccles cake and a chat
brought Blur duo together for comeback shows

Damon Albarn reveals how the rift
with his bandmates was healed - and his plans to play secret
gigs on his home turf of Essex

You can take the boy out of
Essex but not, apparently, Essex out of the boy. Damon Albarn
has drawn musical inspiration from travels in China, Africa
and other far-flung reaches but, as he prepares for the keenly
awaited comeback of Blur, he admits that what excites him most
is the prospect of going home to the county of Mondeo Man and
estuary English.

In an unusually candid interview, Albarn has spoken of a
desire to return to his childhood roots in Colchester, Essex,
and perform secret gigs with Blur, potentially under their
original name, Seymour. And the key to his rapprochement with
former bandmate Graham Coxon? A chat over an Eccles cake.

Earlier this month Blur announced plans to re-form for several
concerts next summer, culminating at Hyde Park in July and a
rumoured headline act at the Glastonbury Festival in June.

Their "Battle of Britpop" against Oasis in the mid-90s made
front pages and was billed as a north-south clash between the
working-class Gallagher brothers and Albarn's posh boys from
Essex.

"Do you know what? The most exciting thing about all this for
me is that I haven't been back to Colchester, or Essex, since
1994," he told broadcaster John Wilson in an interview to be
broadcast tomorrow on Radio 4's Front Row. "That's a long
time. I'm going to get the chance to take my daughter to walk
through the meadows I used to walk through as a kid, go to the
river I used to fish in, swing on the swings I swung on as a
kid. For me that's the most wonderful thing. And I think it's
beautifully ironic that with my kind of wanderlust and desire
to travel and experience the, some would say, the exotic east,
the south, wherever, the thing that excites me next year is
going back to Essex. Can you believe it?"

Blur, who had huge success with the album Parklife in 1994,
last played together six years ago. Since then Albarn, 40, has
taken on an array of innovative projects, including the
virtual band Gorillaz, the group The Good, the Bad and the
Queen, the musical revue Africa Express and the Mandarin opera
Monkey: Journey to the West

Coxon, 39, who was Blur's guitarist, has made solo albums
without recapturing the same success, while the bassist, Alex
James, 40, has carved a new career as a columnist and
cheesemaker, living on a farm in the Cotswolds. The band's
drummer, Dave Rowntree, 44, runs a computer animation firm and
is the Labour party's prospective parliamentary candidate for
the Cities of London and Westminster.

Blur will follow 90s acts, such as the Spice Girls and Take
That, in burying the hatchet for a return to live gigs. Coxon,
Albarn's childhood friend from Stanway Comprehensive School in
Colchester, walked out during Blur's seventh and last album,
Think Tank, branding the frontman an "egomaniac". The album
was completed without him.

Albarn said he had been "emotionally distanced" from Coxon for
10 or 12 years, but then his old friend "turned up just before
I did the Africa Express Koko gig [in Camden Town, part of the
BBC Electric Proms season] and we just went for a walk and
bought a bun - I think it was an eccles cake - and we sat in a
doorway," Albarn recalled. "We just looked at each other said,
you know what, it's all over, isn't it? That strange feeling
that had come between us had gone. So, shall we play together
again?

"It was like, we've got to do this at some point because we
never actually split up, we just stopped talking to each
other. It wasn't money, or anything like that, it was just two
people who really loved each other but who found it impossible
to communicate any more."

He continued: "For me it's all about the fact that I've got my
old mate back. We used to play in a band together and we're
going to play in that band again ... that day, sitting on a
doorstep ... we both accepted that we were never going to
escape the fact that we were in Blur and that it was better to
accept and go forward with optimism and not carrying that
bloody heavy burden."

The millions of fans craving a new record will be kept on
tenterhooks. "If we get back together and it feels like the
hottest band on the planet, then there will be a good argument
to make another record. It would be because of the music, but
for any other reason, forget it."

When news of the Blur reunion broke, the band's official web
forum was receiving 60 hits a second. One contributor wrote:
"Tue Dec 09, 2008: a day to be remembered forever." All 45,000
tickets for the 3 July concert sold in two minutes, prompting
a second date to be announced. The performances will coincide
with Blur's 20th anniversary; they were briefly known as
Seymour, but had become Blur by the time of their first hit,
There's no Other Way, in 1991.

Asked if they would be returning to a garage for rehearsals
and playing gigs under the name Seymour, Albarn said: "Yes, we
kind of are, I shouldn't really say too much, but ... yes,
probably. We're going to retrace it and then go back to the
Midlands, where we got our first taste of what it was like to
really capture a crowd. People who haven't been roadies for 10
years are going to come back and be roadies for us, just for
this occasion ... It's going to be really beautiful or the
most horrific mistake ever!"